iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Alex Norris @acxn.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Great piece and most importantly introduced me to the comment section on the "Caroline Ellison has joined Manifund" blog post.

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Alex Norris @acxn.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

There have been some attempts at this, they just haven't really caught on. simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control...

simple.wikipedia.org

Controlled language - Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Alex Norris @acxn.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

It's so weird to do this with spelling specifically. Like, I can understand that some people might have a talent for memorization, but no one is coming to spelling with all the words already spelled. We all had to work to learn it.

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Alex Norris @acxn.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Even the fact that you are asking for that is proof that campus woke is too powerful

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Alex Norris @acxn.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Yes I can imagine. Currently I'm excited at the potential of the technology, afraid of the concentration of wealth that is enabling it, worried that it's toxic to learning, and rolling my eyes at the idea that it's the Machine God. In The Discourse it's hard to keep to any kind of nuanced position

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Alex Norris @acxn.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I was just talking about how small the center of the skeptical of AI/uses AI Venn diagram is, happy to have this in there!

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Reposted by Alex Norris

Dr. Aure Schrock @aschrock.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Whether you're a cautious AI adopter or trying to avoid AI artifacts, this newsletter is for you. I know academics are cautious because I am, too. And it's tough to stay hype-free! scholarintheloop.com

scholarintheloop.com

Scholar in the Loop | Substack

Scholar in the Loop keeps you up to date on the latest news in AI and other technological advances in academia. Written by a human, Dr. Aure Schrock, for Indelible Voice (indeliblevoice.com). Click to...

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Alex Norris @acxn.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Like Claude gives an answer that I think is fine here (only showing part because I think the summaries are representative of the whole. It might get details wrong that as a non-expert I can't see, but it is not going to systematically go against the scientific consensus

Query: Someone told me "masks work, trust the experts." Are they right?
Claude Response: The short version: "masks work" is partly right, but it's too blunt, and "trust the experts" glosses over real disagreement.

What's well supported

Masks filter particles. Lab studies consistently show that N95/FFP2 respirators filter far better than surgical masks, which filter better than cloth masks, and that fit matters a lot.
In healthcare settings, respirators are standard for aerosol-transmitted diseases, and there's good mechanistic and observational support for them.
Masks also reduce how much an infected person emits, which is part of why "source control" was the original rationale.

A fair summary
A well-fitted N95 or similar respirator likely offers meaningful protection, especially in high-risk settings. Surgical masks probably offer some. Cloth masks likely offer less. Population-level effects of mask mandates are harder to demonstrate and remain debated.

If you tell me what the claim was being used to argue (a mandate, a personal choice, a specific illness), I can be more specific about what the evidence supports.

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Alex Norris @acxn.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

It's worth saying that this is not how it works, at least right now. When LLMs respond to medical questions, they are drawing on the work of experts, though not only that. What RFK is describing is a centrally-controlled info system, which certainly is possible but not something we have yet

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Alex Norris @acxn.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I do wonder if there isn't a "land of the blind" situation going on. The best defense against someone like Thiel is having listened to a philosophical argument before. Yes, lib arts is not a ticket to a moral life, but it might mean you have some defenses when someone brings up capital M Meaning.

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Alex Norris @acxn.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

But the political value of the obsession means someone like Ibrahim is able to not argue with the mainstream but just assert that they are dumb/woke/captured and only he can be your interpreter of the Eastern mind. So I think your argument for medievalists has some echoes for MENA specialists 3/3

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Alex Norris @acxn.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

that modern Islamism, including its rightmost flank, comes out of an Islamic modernist encounter with Western scholarship and especially Western Orientalism around the turn of the 20th century. As Orientalism has become Middle East Studies, the field has tried to shed the obsessions of the former 2/

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Alex Norris @acxn.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Very cool piece. I feel like there's an interesting parallel here between the Christian far right and the Muslim far right (Al Qaeda, ISIS), where they are both reaching for essentially mirror images of the same imagined eternal conflict. My understanding is that part of the reason for this is 1/

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Alex Norris @acxn.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I don't know if you are purposefully doing an experiment where you vary what the pull quote is to get different successive groups mad at the essay they didn't read, but either way I think you are getting results

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Alex Norris @acxn.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

"We trained an AI on the history of US presidentialism and this is what it came up with..."

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Alex Norris @acxn.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Right this is classic "kid playing with toys" logic. Oh you got too close to that building? Well guess what it's full of drones and snipers and folds into a missile launcher.

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Alex Norris @acxn.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Texas resident here! This piece sums my feelings up pretty well. An opinion piece is not a poll, and does not need to encompass the contradictory feelings of a whole state of people.

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Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

1. www.bloomberg.com/opinion/news... So Matt Levine had a newsletter yesterday where he suggested that AI labs could "publish papers about how important it is to slow down" to coordinate an effective cartel. I have a Modest Proposal that goes one better.

bloomberg.com

AI Labs Want Someone to Stop Them

AI and antitrust, lockups and indexes, annuities, Montessori and sudden wealth syndrome.

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Alex Norris @acxn.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Me estimating a logit model: Currently what the program desires to do is to make the likelihood function as high as possible, but what if instead it wants to kill me? www.nytimes.com/video/podcas...

nytimes.com

Video: Ex-Anthropic Employee: Here’s Why A.I. Might Want to Kill Us

The A.I. researcher who quit Anthropic joins Natalie Kitroeff on “The Daily” to discuss why A.I. systems might eventually become “anti-human.”

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Alex Norris @acxn.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

I've been thinking about this because universities are trying to pivot to AI because "it's not going away." But my question is: what kind of labor technology even is it, what kind of person benefits from it, and how does that affect what we teach? And the missing AI startups seem important to that

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Alex Norris @acxn.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

I wonder if we are seeing fewer garage AI because the big companies are trying to oligopolize the tech--they are worried about keeping people in their system because they know general use inventors rarely profit. Maybe as non-frontier models improve, we'll see something more like early internet co.s

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Alex Norris @acxn.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

I have been wondering about the answer to this. Like there are AI startups but afaik that model is "say you are going to revolutionize x field with AI then collect your investor money." Supposedly people w/ ideas but w/o a full team of engineers can use AI to prosper, but idk where that company is

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Alex Norris @acxn.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Folks you are going to want to get in on this, we are seeing quadratic growth in this field

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Alex Norris @acxn.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Technically, every ~5 of us will get one egg, so we will have to agree on what to do with them in our colleggtive

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Alex Norris @acxn.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

This is the same indignation I feel when Texans try to open biotech firms

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Alex Norris @acxn.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Perfect example of faculty thinking like bosses. It doesn't have to be that way! But when it happens, a union is your best protection

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Alex Norris @acxn.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

"In a tally reminiscent of Pravda, we were informed the vote was 859 to 31. So much for diversity of thought." Wait this is so good

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Alex Norris @acxn.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

I had to squint at the end and ask "is that from dulce et decorum est?" Which I think is a compliment

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beetle moses @beetlemoses.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

A New Color (1/5🧵)

Page 1: A man is walking home, smoking a cigarette, being quietly trailed by a UFO above him. As he enters his apartment, two aliens watch from inside the ship. Alien 1, who has a large head, says, “that’s him. Let’s move.”

Page 2: The man walks upstairs as the aliens watch from the entrance of the building. The man enters his apartment and greets his little dog. Suddenly there is a knock at the door.

Page 3: he peers through his peephole, and sees the two aliens standing in the hallway. Alien 1 is holding a briefcase. From behind him, the voice of alien one: “don’t scream.”

Page 4: The aliens are seated across the room on the man’s couch. Sadie is in her bed next to them. Alien 1 says, “you’re not in any danger. Have a seat.” The man looks at his dog and thinks, “sadie is unusually calm.” Alien 1: don’t scream, or it’s a problem.

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Alex Norris @acxn.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

It is actually maddening to have the "compete with China" administration in place when it doesn't want to compete with China on anything that actually matters

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Alex Norris @acxn.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Wouldn't you draw a line between this and making statements about human nature having elements that make government, including self-government, hard? Like not just liberals have failed at tying the will of the populace to the decisions of government, and arguably they've succeeded more than most

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Alex Norris @acxn.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Wow all my favorite greek letters are here lea.ac $$ \theta \beta \pi \phi \rho \sigma $$

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Alex Norris @acxn.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

logged in, next steps pending

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Reposted by Alex Norris

Maria Antoniak @mariaa.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Check it out! Lea is live and open to the public 🥳 Lea is an experiment to build better social media by researchers and for researchers, where we own our own data and can build our own feeds, events, and communities. This is still very much a proof-of-concept; we welcome ideas + collaborators!

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Alex Norris @acxn.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

I don't think it's just the left that finds this ineffectual. And I think it is on leadership to try to shape this perception. We are in a political environment where the image is everything, so if, as a political body, you lose control of the meaning of the image, you have done something wrong

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Alex Norris @acxn.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

The dem leadership's problem is wider than the left. Leadership have their rhetorical response to events (Trump or in this case BLM) and an action they take, and the two can seem to be completely at odds. Rhetoric is sky-high and action is often "we tried to pass a bill and republicans blocked it"

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Alex Norris @acxn.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

I think you're right and like this is part of why it would be nice to have fewer 75 y/o congresspeople, black or otherwise. Yes, there's a resistance on the left to the framing "what would you do in pelosi's shoes" because people in power and people out of it are imagined to be incomparable. But...

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Alex Norris @acxn.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Yeah I'm good at R basically I just reenter install.packages until it works or I die.

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Alex Norris @acxn.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

(This is obviously just more bluster in the bluster contest, but why can't we have fun in the Infinity War?)

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Alex Norris @acxn.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

The eyes of Jimmy Carter's corpse snap open. "The cycle is complete," it rasps. Its eyes close again. It is finally at rest.

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Alex Norris @acxn.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

It's interesting that despite thinking about the public opinion implications less, Luigi Mangione did a better job getting the public onboard for violence than the Prairieland activists. In general, people I've seen advocate violence seem to be the ones thinking abt strategies of violence the least

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Alex Norris @acxn.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

There are people who point to the horror of the Trump policy on Gaza as proof that pro-Pal protesters didn't know how good they had it with Biden. But this article makes clear that it's only through the Biden admin's abject failure that Israel was able to run out the clock to Trump. To the hague!

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Scam Ghouldin @gotitatguineys.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

The best edit I’ve seen in weeks, you absolutely have to turn the sound on for this one.

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Alex Norris @acxn.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

Would only click if they made the site abdulhaqq dot com

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Alex Norris @acxn.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

Oh my God it's the dark mirror version of "the NED organized the Hong Kong protests" complete with "millions of dollars over 13 years"

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